Customer Success as a Culture — Why Sigstr Believes Anticipating the Needs of the Customer Success Team is a Strategic Necessity
Customer success teams have gone through strategic changes and growth over the past few years. This important strategy and business focus drives toward the outcome of retaining and growing your customer base. As you continue to adapt and change your customer success strategies and tactics, remember this key focus—customer success is not a department, it’s a culture.
We are passionate about customer success and it’s positive outcome—building relationships that last™. In our latest eBook, our team at ClientSuccess interviewed 7 customer success leaders at the forefront of these changes. These leaders have incredible advice they’ve learned by actually going through the process and learning firsthand.
Our newest eBook entitled “Customer Success as a Culture: Customer Leaders Edition”, shares best practices focused on the strategic and tactical aspects of building and scaling effective customer success teams. Each week, we’ll highlight one of the customer success leaders and will share some of their key learnings with you. This week, you’ll learn from Dave Duke, VP of Customer Success at Sigstr.
Let’s get started:
About Sigstr
Sigstr powers smart marketing through email signatures. Its SaaS product drives brand compliance and unlocks the marketing potential of employee email signatures. With Sigstr, every employee email includes a consistently branded email signature, and marketers can easily update signature campaigns to drive awareness and engagement for key events, case studies, product updates, news, and job opportunities.
How do you effectively train and scale your customer success team? What are the keys?
“It terms of training, I think one of the more strategic things you can do is to anticipate the needs of your team,” explained Dave. “Leaders must always be listening to their direct reports, customers and other team members throughout the organization so they can be in tune with the strengths and weaknesses of the business. The majority of customer interactions are reliant on internal and external knowledge sharing, so it is critical that training the team for these interactions be a priority.” Dave explains they accomplish this, “… through exercises such as role playing, ongoing support case review, and customer feedback discussion. Development of employees must be a consistent and planned list of activities. Creating and fulfilling a training and development calendar will keep your team’s skills sharp.”
“As for scaling a team, effective customer coaching, empowering team members to make decisions, leveraging a knowledge base regularly and utilizing application data to automate communication when possible, are four strategies that can produce longstanding results,” said Dave.
How do you get support from the entire company?
Sigstr is still a small company with 15 employees, so they work closely with all departments. Dave explained that communication between the Customer Success and Product teams is critical at their company stage as they work to implement customers successfully and deliver on their value proposition. “We work with an ‘all hands on deck’ mentality consistently to ensure that we are doing whatever we can to create longstanding relationships with our customers. Our Customer Success team sits right beside our Product team which has proved to be an excellent strategy as we work to iterate quickly. In addition, we have started to elevate the importance of the Account Executive to Success Manager transfer internally as this is a key component to ensuring implementation gets off to a great start,” explained Dave.
How can your CSMs vocalize customer concerns with executives?
1:1 employee/manager weekly meetings and product leadership meetings are the two primary vehicles for discussing customer concerns with executives at Sigstr. As the team evolves, NPS will be a consistent measuring device that will also assist with this type of communication. “We are also creating a voice of customer repository which will be used to highlight the most pressing customer feedback topics across all facets of the business,” said Dave.
Read Dave’s full contribution to the ebook entitled, “Customer Success as a Culture: Customer Success Leaders Edition” and learn from 6 other customer success leaders like Dave.
Download the full “Customer Success as a Culture” ebook collection:
Customer Success as a Culture: Sales Leaders Edition
Customer Success as a Culture: Marketing Leaders Edition
Customer Success as a Culture: Product Leaders Edition
Learn more about how ClientSuccess can help your company develop a strong customer success methodology and strategy with easy-to-use customer success software by requesting a 30-minute demo.